The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

To put it simply, I would viciously murder a complete stranger in cold blood in front of their loved ones if it hastened my acquisition of this game.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Spike

I have a question about my setup. I'm wondering if I can play Oblivion with CLOSE to maximum settings or not with this rig:

In one of the interviews it was hinted at that Oblivion was designed to scale upwards with technology, meaning that even top of the line systems currently wouldn't be able to run it at complete max settings (view distance being the biggest factor in question). However, there is no doubt that the game will look absolutely beautiful on that setup.

Two days video is out, and Bethsoft's servers are once again crying in agony. Get it while it's hot.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Spike

Funny, someone was able to give me an answer. And there are people out there who may have connections and have seen footage of the game being run on different hardware configurations and can give insight to those that have less knowledge with Oblivion and computers in general.

Just guessing really, but everything you have is fairly high end so unless this game has some horrible optimization (and all signs point to no) it should look great and run fast.

How ya doing, buddy?

Put the game in my drive, spent 3 hours in heaven, crashed while fighting a dremora. So yeah, while this certainly seems more stable than Morrowind on release, it's still got all those odd Bethesda quirks. In addition to this, my opening movie is royally screwed up. First there's a still shot of the Emperor while he talks, then it zooms in on his face and freezes for a split second, then it transitions to footage of Oblivion in a tiny corner of the screen, then The footage appears fullscreen all garbled, then I hit spacebar and skip it.

Apart from that (and the fact that I can't figure out how the hell to actually win the thieve's guild contest) this game is mindblowing. After spending a few hours just fast travelling and doing the main quest (I undertook my first mission in the Plane of Oblivion at level 1, it was a rush.) I decided to just trot around on my horse and take in some of the beauty of this game. As it happened, I had to hop off the pony a few times to teach some bandits manners and thin down the local wolf population, but I'd still recommend the Cyrodil province for all equestrian enthusiasts.

Edit: Forgot I was going to add some specs for comparison purposes.

AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (Slightly below recommended)
1gb DDR Ram
Geforce 6800 (softmodded to enable extra pipelines so it's basically an underclocked ultra)

The game defaulted to High Settings for me, which actually suprised me a bit and warranted some celebration. It runs great indoors and out, though there is some noticeable slowdown when lots of NPCs are out and fighting each other. Far away mountains and forests do show some noticable pixelation, but I don't really see how you can expect better seeing as how that's actual landscape instead of a backdrop and extending level of detail that far would turn the game into a slideshow even on current top of the line machines.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I actually have the same problem as David Deluxe, though not quite as extreme. I've found the only fix is changing color settings on the graphics card, but in order to get it to a level where you can actually see dark pictures, movies, and games you have to move it to where everything else is terribly washed out. It's quite a drag having a dying monitor.

I was speaking idiomatically.